The second film after Miyazaki\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s “retirement\u00e2\u20ac\u009d, Howl\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s Moving Castle<\/I> is enjoyable, if a bit of a mixed bag.
\n
\nSophie Hatter is a young woman who lives as a milliner. She lives in a world at war \u00e2\u20ac\u201c and it is never made clear quite why it is warring \u00e2\u20ac\u201c and frequently hears tell of the wizard Howl, who eats the hearts of beautiful young women and the like. Sophie does not fear Howl, as she does not believe herself to be beautiful.<\/p>\n
One day, Sophie meets Howl in an alleyway. Howl then inadvertently involves Sophie in his battle with the Witch of the Wastes, who later visits Sophie and “curses\u00e2\u20ac\u009d her with the body of a ninety year old woman. What\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s more, the curse does not allow Sophie to tell anyone that she has been cursed.
\nHeading out into the world, because she sees little point staying at home, an enchanted scarecrow leads Sophie to Howl\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s Moving Castle: a home on legs, where the eccentric (but not heart eating) wizard sometimes dwells with the demon Calcifer and young boy Markl. <\/p>\n
The rest of the film is rather hazy; I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122m not particularly sure I know what it was actually about. Sophie falls in love with Howl, Howl\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s a coward, and all the rest. From the reports that I have read, the war is actually something that Ghibli created for the story, so this is less of an adaptation of Dianna Wynn-Jones\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s book so much as it is a use of the same characters and basic concept.<\/p>\n
The problem with this approach is that such a haphazard treatment results in something of a haphazard film: to insert the conflict of a war without giving any reasoning behind that war, to have Howl playing all sides of the war without allowing us to understand the world\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s approach to wizardry is simply unfair.<\/p>\n
Miyazaki is a fan of the redeemable villain, but this reduces the Witch of the Wastes to a flat character who adds little to the film beyond being just about the ugliest thing that Miyazaki has done this side of Princess Mononoke<\/i>\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s demons, and at least they<\/I> were organic. Miyazaki is also a fan of the ambiguous villain, and we get that in spades with Madam Suliman, whose purpose in the film is the very definition of “vague”. Its greatest crime is that it employs the “instant love” technique to motivate Sophie’s character . I’ll call the whole film vague and leave it at that.<\/p>\n
Howl\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s Moving Castle<\/I> is an enjoyable film, but it feels kind of out of place in the Ghibli oeuvre. Ghibli has<\/i> produced films based on books before, but this is the first foreign book they have adapted. That does not matter, as Ghibli films can provide any sort of atmosphere; the issue with Howl<\/I> is that it does not strictly make a lot of sense; I really can’t say much more than that.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
The second film after Miyazaki\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s “retirement\u00e2\u20ac\u009d, Howl\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s Moving Castle is enjoyable, if a bit of a mixed bag.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[103,104,105],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-265","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-howls-moving-castle","category-miyazaki-hayao","category-studio-ghibli"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/batrock.net\/anime\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/265","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/batrock.net\/anime\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/batrock.net\/anime\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/batrock.net\/anime\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/batrock.net\/anime\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=265"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/batrock.net\/anime\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/265\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/batrock.net\/anime\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=265"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/batrock.net\/anime\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=265"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/batrock.net\/anime\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=265"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}